Kurhaus, although what they profess to cure in that house may simply
be a reluctance on the part of the holder to diminish his letter of
credit. It is three hundred feet or more in length, this Kurhaus, and
its commodious hall, in which are held some very excellent symphony
orchestra concerts, can seat as many as 3,000 people. On the side
of the Kurhaus overlooking the sea there is a large stone terrace
where the band plays in the afternoons, and, underneath this, a very
expensive café.
Just opposite the Kurhaus is the pier--a real old-fashioned ocean
going steel pier, terminating in a concert pavilion and built right
out into the water for almost a quarter of a mile, having a plate
glass partition down the middle, so that there is a lee and a weather
side to it. At intervals along its sides are fish nets, which may be
raised from or lowered into the water by means of a crank and spindle
attached to the pier railing. These are rented to the public on the
time basis, and there is ever a group of persistent people vibrating
between one net and another in the hope that its operator may bring
to the rail a real denizen of the watery depths. I contracted the
fever one day myself and fell in with this flitting crowd for an hour,
more or less, only to be unrewarded in the end, but I am told that if
anything piscatorially larger than an adult white-bait inadvertently
becomes enmeshed in any of the nets and is brought to the surface the
successful fisher receives round after round of enthusiastic applause.
And Scheveningen is in no sense of the word a philanthropic
institution. Everything in the place has its price mark tagged securely
on. You have to pay to walk on the pier, concert or no concert; you
have to pay to listen to the band from the Kurhaus terrace; you have
to pay to sit in one of the yellow mushroom chairs that make the beach
resemble a fungus growth; you have to pay even to take a bath in the
ocean, and are then restricted to the hours of from seven in the
morning until sunset. On Sundays they close up the ocean for bathing
purposes at 2 P.M.
[Illustration: The Kurhaus at Scheveningen, Holland’s most expensive,
most fashionable and most diverting seaside resort]
But sea bathing is a different proposition in Europe from what it is
in America. At Scheveningen it is a matter of the most serious import,
and the necessities for its success--I almost said “enjoyment”--are
many. To go about it in the proper manner, you first approach the
ticket window on the Boulevard in front of the Kurhaus and apply to
the cashier for a permit, varying in price according to the class
of bath selected. Providing you have brought your own bathing suit,
this will be the only payment necessary, for the permit graciously
entitles you to the use of two towels, obviously for drying purposes.
In case you have come unprepared with regard to bathing apparel,
you will have to pay for a suit, although, judging from those I
have seen personally, the wearer should be the one to be rewarded.
To avail yourself of the use of a “bath-sheet”--whatever that may
be--necessitates additional expenditure, and there are various other
alleged indispensable articles that the cashier may try to inflict upon
the unwary at face value.
The next step is to repair to the beach and await the calling out
of the number shown on your ticket, whereupon you are assigned to a
striped kind of house on wheels, of the same kith and kin as an English
“caravan” wagon. In this you must wait until the attendant sees fit
to hitch his horse to it and haul you, wagon and all, into the surf.
During the voyage you will have finished changing your costume and the
minute your wagon is backed into the water you are ready to commence
your amphibious performance. A high sign to the attendant will be the
signal that you have survived the operation of bathing, and, presto!
his horse will haul you out upon dry land again.
Doubtless on account of the expenses incurred in taking the proper
precautions for bathing there are more waders at Scheveningen,
especially among the thrifty Dutch, than there are bathers. Human
snipe, ducks, and storks, according to their respective builds, with
trousers rolled to their knees or petticoats pinned up to a similar
altitude, daily patrol the edge of the ocean for a mile or more.
Surf riding is another favorite method of spending a half hour’s time
at Scheveningen, the game being to suffer oneself to be bobbed up and
down at the mercy of the breakers in a tethered fishing boat, only to
be ultimately carried ashore again on the backs of the crew.
An obelisk at the southern end of the Boulevard commemorates the
landing of Prince William Frederic of Orange, but the victorious naval
achievement of Admiral de Ruyter in defeating the combined French
and English fleets off the coast of Scheveningen in 1673, remains
unhonored.
VII
LEYDEN AND HAARLEM
If you happen to have penetrated Holland as far as The Hague without
having availed yourself of the steam tram method of conveyance between
one town and another the trip by this means from The Hague to Leyden
might be suggested as an excellent one with which to commence to
develop the habit.
The tram that operates on regular schedule between the Schenkweg in
The Hague and the Groote Ryndyk in Leyden pierces a delightful country
checkered by a labyrinth of canals, long and short, wide and narrow.
Even every patch of humble cabbages appears to be surrounded with
one, along which the truck gardeners pole their boats that bear the
vegetables direct from soil to market. Tree crested dikes, straight
as the shortest distance between two points, stretch away into the
perspective in every direction. Villas and cozy country cottages come
quickly into view and fade away again behind their groves of trees,
giving the traveler just a flitting suggestion of the comfort their
owners must find in them. In passing through the neat little brick-paved
villages of Voorburg and Voorschoten the tram engine careens
around through the streets as if it had developed a first-class state
of intoxication. It aims directly for a kitchen door here and the walls
of a church there, only to miss them by a few feet while making a
dexterous turn to the other side of the road, twisting its diminutive
train of two or three cars in its wake. Then out beside the dikes again
it puffs and sputters on its seemingly remonstrative way to Leyden.
Leyden is a quiet, curious old town, rich in history and effervescent
with learning. With due respect to art, it was the birthplace of a
dozen or more of the most illustrious Dutch painters of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, including Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, and last,
but by no means least, the celebrated Rembrandt; but, strange to
tell, it cannot boast of a single masterpiece of any of them. At its
university, then renowned throughout the world, the future savants
of the age came to pore over their books. Hugo Grotius was one of
its earlier sons, and later, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven,
Oliver Goldsmith aspired in vain to the degree of Doctor of Medicine,
afterwards conferred at Louwain, giving Leyden the first opportunity of
being its donor. The town’s many museums--of ethnography, of natural
history, of comparative anatomy, of physiology, of archeology--bespeak
its hobby: the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Even many of the signs
one reads in the town are in Latin.
[Illustration: An excellent way to go from The Hague to Leyden is by
steam tram, the curious engine of which is shown here]
Four hundred years ago Leyden could brag about its 100,000 population
without treading on the toes of any city in Holland. To-day it
contains little more than half as many souls as it did then. Since
its “revision downward” from its pinnacle at the top of the Dutch
textile industry, it has seemed a sacrilege to conduct business in the
place. Its university sustained for a time the reputation that its
weaving enterprises relinquished, but now we go to Vienna, instead of
to Leyden, to glean the fine points in the science of medicine. Using
Discovery for a fulcrum, Time undermines methods with the infallibility
of the sun’s attraction, and brands them as obsolete forever.
The historical bench mark of Leyden is the siege it survived at the
point of the Spanish bayonet in the sixteenth century. Lasting, in the
aggregate, from October 31, 1573, until October 3, 1574, this siege may
be considered as one of the longest and most persistent in the annals
of history, and its ultimate relief was as characteristic, picturesque,
and ingenious as if it had been the plot of a tale by Dumas.
At the expense of the lives of 4,000 patriots, himself included, Count
Louis of Nassau effected a partial relief of Leyden five months after
the siege commenced; but, encouraged by the butchery of this Dutch
commander and his comparative handful of soldiers, the Spaniards
continued to hold on so tenaciously that William the Silent concocted
the daring scheme to flood the intervening country with water from the
sea so that his fleet might sail in to the rescue.
Having already reduced Leyden to the point of starvation, Valdez, the
Spanish general, in glowing phrases offered pardon to the citizens if
they would but open the gates of the beleaguered city and surrender.
But the people would have none of it, placing renewed confidences in
their leader, William of Orange, and consoling themselves as best they
could with the firm belief that he was listening to their prayers and
would ultimately devise some means of raising the blockade.
As time dragged wearily on, the sorties of the Dutch became less
frequent and, finally, it was announced by the din of clanging church
bells that the gates should henceforth be kept closed and no man should
venture outside the city.
Even at this time, William, unbeknown to the people of Leyden, was
appealing to the States to allow him to open the flood gates of
Rotterdam and Schiedam and to pierce the dikes along the Meuse and the
Yssel in order to inundate the country and give his fleet a fairway
to the very watchtowers of Leyden. After much debate, his proposition
for effecting the relief, although a most destructive one to the
surrounding country, was accepted; bonds were issued by the States to
help defray the expenses of the task, and patriotic Dutch housewives
disposed of silver plate and jewelry as their contributions to the
financial furtherance of the scheme.
It was not until some days after the Prince had supervised in person
the unlocking of the gates at Schiedam and Rotterdam on August 3rd and
the rupture of the dikes at sixteen different places along the Yssel,
that the starving prisoners of Leyden commenced to grow impatient and
appealed by letter to Orange, telling him that their bread was gone
and that the supply of its only substitute, malt cakes, would last but
four days longer. To their letters the Prince, having unfortunately and
most untimely contracted the fever, answered reassuringly from his sick
bed in Rotterdam to the effect that the dikes had been cut, that water
was already pouring in over the land, and that as soon as its depth
was sufficient to float the fleet an attempt at rescue would be made.
The message was read by the Burgomaster, Van der Werf, to the people
assembled in the market place, and the welcome news was received with
great rejoicings.
Although the water about Leyden had by this time reached a depth of ten
inches, the Spaniards, at first confused, later became confident that
the thing could not be accomplished. When, from the lack of a breeze,
the water failed to rise higher; and because of the inability of the
prostrate Prince, which neither the besiegers nor besieged had heard of
nor even imagined, curtailed additional attempts to flood the country;
the Spaniards began to taunt the valiant citizens. “Go up to the tower,
ye Beggars,” they cried, “go up to the tower and tell us if ye can see
the ocean coming over the dry land to your relief.”
But the citizens did go up to the tower, and, after bravely having
withstood the siege until early in September, by which time a gale
of wind had risen and the Prince had recovered in a measure from his
illness, they did see the ocean coming over the dry land to their
relief, and with a vengeance. Not only that, but they also saw a
welcome fleet of two hundred vessels coming in on the crest of the
ocean; they saw this fleet come up from the south, steadily and
undisputed, to within five miles of Leyden; they saw it demolish the
Spanish forts--a navy of surgeons cauterizing the festering sores on
the face of fair Holland. Then, to their consternation, they saw the
gale die out and the waters recede, leaving the entire fleet stranded
at North Aa, just beyond cannon’s shot of its goal.
Despair took the place of hope in the hearts of the besieged. They
implored, and then threatened the life of Burgomaster Van der Werf if
he refused to surrender to the Spaniards. He came out into the little
square just opposite the old church of St. Pancras, waved his felt hat
as a signal for silence, and delivered himself of a short but pithy
address that turned despair into faith, animosity into pride, and fired
the hearts of his countrymen with renewed patriotism. What he said
on that occasion has gone down in history as one of the most superb
proclamations ever uttered by a brave man for a national cause.
“What would ye, my friends?” he said. “Why do ye murmur that we do
not break our vows and surrender the city to the Spaniards?--a fate
more horrible than the agony which she now endures. I tell you that I
have made an oath to hold the city, and may God give me strength to
keep my oath! I can die but once; whether by your hands, the enemy’s,
or by the hand of God. My own fate is indifferent to me. Not so that
of the city intrusted to my care. I know that we shall starve if not
soon relieved; but starvation is preferable to the dishonored fate
which is the only alternative. Your menaces move me not. My life is
at your disposal. Here is my sword; plunge it into my breast and
divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but
expect no surrender so long as I remain alive.”
How the populace of Leyden, after listening to this, rushed to the
ramparts with renewed courage engendered within them and hurled
defiance in the teeth of the bloodthirsty Spaniards; how as many as
8,000 died in the streets from the plague alone, germinated by the
foulness of the beleaguered city; how the frantic people stripped even
the leaves from the trees to relieve their hunger and fought over the
garbage pits for every possible morsel of food; how at last a violent
equinoctial gale on the first two days of October filled the lowland
with water and floated the stranded fleet; how this fleet sailed in
between the trees and the chimney pots of submerged farmhouses, putting
the Spaniards to flight as it advanced; and how, on the morning of the
3rd of October, the Dutch ships, under Admiral Boisot, paddled up the
canals of Leyden while the stricken citizens gathered on the banks and
tried to shout with wild delight, but could not on account of their
emaciated condition--are all matters of historical fact that may be
perused in detail in the pages of any authoritative work on the rise of
the Dutch Republic.
It is also an historical fact that on the very next day after the
relief of Leyden the gale shifted and blew with all its fury from the
northeast, driving out the waters before it, so that within a few days
the country was as it had been before and the labor of repairing the
dikes commenced forthwith.
As a reward for the sufferings of the people of Leyden the city was
granted an annual fair of ten days with exemption from taxes and the
States caused the university to be established.
The University of Leyden doesn’t look much like our idea of a
university, for the professors, except those in the department of
medicine, teach their classes at home, the nine hundred students live
in the town, and, as a result, dormitories and classrooms are things
that may be dispensed with. The old “university building,” however,
originally a nunnery, maintains in its connection one of the finest
libraries in Holland.
Not far from where the lofty perpendicular Gothic windows of the
church of St. Pancras overlook the square in which the Burgomaster
extemporized with such eloquence at the time of the siege, a shipload
of gunpowder exploded in 1807. After removing the débris of the
buildings which it razed, the Leydeners planted the site as a public
park and erected a statue of the valiant Van der Werf in the center
of it. Backed by two or three handsome new buildings belonging to the
university and facing a wide, clear canal, this Van der Werf Park
vies with the Botanical Gardens behind the old university building,
as peaceful a spot in which to spend a moonlit evening pondering over
the history of the old place as may be found in Leyden; while from
the Morsch Gate, a well preserved remnant of earlier fortifications,
many temptingly shaded walks twist and twine through the immediate
neighborhood.
In Leyden, and not in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, as one might suppose,
I came across a beggar for the first time in Holland, although
technically, he came across me. The atmosphere of book learning was
probably what launched him on his career, for he certainly seemed
able-bodied enough to make a more honest living by the sweat of
his brow; but the people of Leyden are not given much to fluent
perspiration. And it might be here mentioned that one of the reliefs
of travel in Holland, compared with Italy, for example, is its dearth
of mendicants and beggars. Cripples and the poverty stricken are to
be found in Holland as in any other country, but, as a rule, they do
not submit their complaints to the sympathies of the tourist. Wherever
possible, one of Holland’s world famed charitable institutions gets
hold of them and sends them from the congested city to the pauper
colony in the country. Three such colonies, founded in 1817, are
situated near the railway line from Meppel to Leeuwarden, while in
the one city of Amsterdam there are more than a hundred benevolent
institutions. The Society for the Public Welfare, or, in Dutch,
_Maatschappij tot Nut van’t Algemeen_, with headquarters in Amsterdam,
was founded in 1784 and has made its influence felt throughout the
entire kingdom.
Katwyk and Noordwyk, three miles apart, the particular seashore
resorts that cater especially to the people of Leyden and Haarlem,
are both connected by steam tram with Leyden. Both are insignificant
and expensive, and neither is so attractive as Domburg nor so gay as
Scheveningen. Their wide beaches of fine sand would seem to us their
only assets.
But if you would have further evidence of the Dutch mastery of the
element of water, take the tram to Katwyk aan Zee and walk up the
beach a half mile or more to where they have harnessed the mouth of the
old Rhine and curbed its outlet to suit their convenience.
A hurricane having thrown up the sand before the mouth of the river
in the year 839, thus causing its flow into the ocean to be blocked,
its backed-up waters created a swamp which all but covered the entire
territory known as Rynland, and which, in the subsequent diversion of
the river’s course, was largely responsible for the formation of the
vast delta in the south. In 1807 the Dutch conceived the project of
draining this swamp and making _polders_ of it by pumping its water
into especially constructed canals. Later they relieved the congestion
of sand at the old Rhine’s mouth and built a series of flood gates
across it. By closing these gates at high tide they were enabled to
exclude the inrush of water from the ocean, and by opening them again
at low tide, they permitted the accumulated waters of the river to flow
out into the ocean at the rate of 50,000 cubic feet per minute. Thus
was the Haarlemerpolder, seventy-two square miles in extent, reclaimed
from what used to be the Haarlemermeer.
The tram line from Leyden to Katwyk passes first through the village of
Endegeest, the home and workshop of Descartes for a number of years,
and then through Rynsburg, the former residence of that grandfather
of modern philosophy, Spinoza, born of Jewish parents in Amsterdam
in 1632. The little places are so shady, so peaceful, so still, that
anyone having been brought up within their solitudes might very
naturally develop the pastime of philosophizing without half trying.
The latter part of April or the first part of May is the proper time
of year to visit Haarlem and its vicinity. Then the tulips, crocuses,
lilies, and hyacinths are in the halcyon days of their bloom, swaying
languidly to and fro in the gentle breeze and diffusing a delicious
perfume that is wafted over the country for miles. Fields and fields of
them there are--a sweetly scented “crazy quilt” of superlative sheen
and luster; for Haarlem, the greatest flower garden in the world,
exports bulbs of all varieties to every civilized country.
Whether the Dutch or the Portuguese became the first European tulip
fanciers is a moot question. The flower originally came from the East,
its name being derived from the Persian _toliban_, or turban. Suffice
it to say that by 1636 bulb culture in general and tulip culture in
particular had developed into a veritable mania in and about Haarlem.
Bulbs became then as much an item of speculation as shares of mining
stock are at the present day--and just as uncertain. Fortunes were made
and lost in the open market. Generally speaking, everybody in Haarlem,
whether or not he professed to be anything of a floriculturist,
dickered through the brokers in bulbs. One speculator in Amsterdam
netted almost $35,000 in four months. Prices went up steadily until,
at the height of the boom, the bulb of a “Viceroy” brought $2,000, an
“Admiral Liefkens” slightly more, and a “Semper Augustus” was sold for
$6,000.
Then came the panic. The bottom dropped out of the bucket of bulbs.
The government forbade the gambling, and between suns the price of
an offshoot of the “Semper Augustus” dropped to fifty florins, or
approximately twenty-two dollars.
After a century of quiet, somebody started a short-lived palpitation in
hyacinths, but the highest price paid for a single hyacinth bulb was
not more than $800.
To-day the Dutch make more of a serious business of bulb raising, and
the rather inconspicuous offshoot has become a recognized article of
trade and commerce. Almost all of the 2,000 Dutch varieties of tulips
have been developed by patient and thoughtful culture from the _Tulipa
Gesneriana_, which Conrad Gesner purchased in Constantinople and
brought to Augsburg in Germany in 1559.
In Holland the tulip is propagated both from the seed and from the
offshoots of the bulb. The offshoots may be expected to reproduce their
true variety as to colorings and markings, growing to a flowering size
in three or four years. Seedlings, on the other hand, are less vain and
more reticent. No matter what the complexions of their parents might
have been, the first flowers of a seedling, appearing after it has had
four or five years’ growth, are of a single color. A tulip in such a
state is called a “breeder,” and remains so until, after several years,
its flower suddenly “breaks” into the gorgeous colors of the “flamed”
or the “feathered” tulip. It is then classified according to color and
variety and placed upon the market. To hasten this period of “breaking”
in the career of the tulip--for no man can compute with any degree of
certainty the year in which it will take place--the growers resort to
various means, even sending the bulbs away sometimes for a change of
climate. “Breeders” that have taken on the desired markings and colors
are said to have become “rectified.” But the problem of chance that
the seedling tulips will “break” into a new variety is one that the
Dutch have been pondering over for centuries, and, as has already been
said, they have been rewarded to the extent of 2,000 varieties. Much
care is devoted to the preparation of the soil and, after fertilizing
thoroughly, the grower will first plant it with potatoes for a couple
of years in order to diminish its strength and adapt it better to
the cultivation of tulips. The bulbs are taken up each summer, their
offshoots detached, and then replaced in fresh soil.